Tag Archives: Meadows Museum

The Meadows Museum at SMU in Dallas and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid have announced a new pre-doctoral fellowship, part of the unique international partnership that unites these two leading museums. A grant from the Center for Spain in America (CSA) supports now the pre-doctoral Meadows/Prado Fellowship, designed to provide students with an intensive scholarly, professional, and international experience in curatorial work. The fellowships are an annual exchange with one appointment made by each institution.

The CSA and its Spanish counterpart, the CEEH, have collaborated with the Meadows Museum on several projects prior to this announcement, including the exhibition and catalogue for The Lost Manuscripts fromthe Sistine Chapel: An Epic Journey from Rome to Toledo (2011); the exhibition and catalogue for The Spanish Gesture: Drawings From Murilloto Goya in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2014); Sorolla in America:Friends and Patrons (2015); and the exhibition catalogue Zurbarán:Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle (2017).

This spring, the Meadows Museum will present Dallas’s first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the work of Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002). Chillida, one of Spain’s most celebrated modern sculptors, is famous for his monumental iron and stone sculptures that shape both urban and rural landscapes. This exhibition includes 66 of the artist’s works, from his sculptures, to his drawings, collages, gravitations, graphic works, and a selection of his books. Co-curated by William Jeffett, chief curator of exhibitions for The Dalí Museum, and Ignacio Chillida, the artist’s son, the works in Memory, Mind, Matter: The Sculpture of Eduardo Chillidacome exclusively from the Museo Chillida-Leku in Hernani (San Sebastián, Spain); the exhibition travels to Dallas from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. A complimentary exhibition, Chillida inDallas: De Musica at the Meyerson, is curated by Meadows/Mellon/Prado Curatorial Fellow Amanda W. Dotseth and will focus on the landmark commission by Chillida at Dallas’s Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center. The two exhibitions will open on February 4, 2018, and run through June3.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an educational programme which will include:

The Dallas News reports that internationally recognised art historian William B. Jordan died Monday in Dallas after a short illness.

After obtaining a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, he helped Mr. Algur Meadows form a new collection of Spanish paintings for Southern Methodist University. Later on, he was curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, Kimbell Art Museum and, eventually, a trustee of the Nasher Sculpture Center and the DMA.

In 1986, Dianne Goode and Dr. Bill Jordan are seen in this Fete Set photo.(Joe Laird /Staff Photographer)

Jordan was known for his unerring eye and outstanding ability to identify potential acquisitions and new masterpieces. Perhaps his crowning achievement was the discovery and subsequent personal gift to the Prado Museum in Madrid of the Portrait of Philip III by the greatest Spanish painter of the Golden Age, Diego Velázquez. Jordan donated the work (estimated at $6 million) to the Prado on Dec. 17, 2016 and was consequently made a trustee of the most significant museum of Spanish art in the world.

Call for Papers: Wider Worlds: Art and Audience Under the Spanish Crown, The Frick Collection, New York, April 5, 2018Deadline: Dec 12, 2017

Symposium
The Frick Collection, New York

The Frick Collection is pleased to invite submissions for “Wider Worlds: Art and Audience under the Spanish Crown,” a public symposium inspired by the special exhibition Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle (January 31 to April 22, 2018). Co-organized with the Meadows Museum, in Dallas, where the paintings are currently on view, this exhibition marks the first time that Francisco de Zurbarán’s set of thirteen monumental canvases depicting the family of the biblical prophet Jacob will be displayed in the Americas.

Zurbarán’s paintings were probably commissioned in the 1640s for a monastery in colonial Spanish Peru, where the popularity of this particular iconography drew on histories positing the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas as “lost descendants” of the twelve tribes of Israel. The works traveled to England and, in 1756, entered the collection of the bishop Richard Trevor, an advocate for the rights of Jewish people. This history, as well as the apocryphal story of the paintings’ seizure by pirates, prompts us to think seriously about the afterlives of objects, anticipated versus accidental receptions, and art’s capacity for generating multivalent, sometimes competing, interpretations. For Jacob and His Twelve Sons, those interpretations range from justifying the enterprises of one colonial empire to serving as symbols of religious tolerance in another.

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers on the status of the art object and the circulation of objects and ideas in the early modern Hispanic world. Please send a C.V. and 250-word abstract by Tuesday, December 12, 2017, to academic@frick.org. Submissions from emerging scholars, including early career university and museum professionals and advanced doctoral students, are particularly encouraged. Possible lines of inquiry include:

• How artists, patrons, and audiences dealt with anxieties around distance, delay, and the conveyance of meaning in the diverse and multilingual early modern Hispanic world;
• Re-signification and/or halted trajectories in the biographies of objects, especially in a global context;
• The imaging of origin myths and master narratives;
• How Iberia’s Jewish and Islamic pasts were interrogated and reinterpreted in Catholic image practices;
• The issue of workshops, masters, and authorship and their relationship to global markets;
• The global and material turns in art-historical scholarship.

Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, in Western Spain, but spent most of his working life in Seville. Like Ribera, Zurbarán is also considered a Caravaggista (a follower of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, active 1571-1610) particularly for his exceptional use of chiaroscuro.

These 13 paintings (12 by Zurbarán and one a direct copy of the work by Zurbarán) are a visual narrative of Jacob’s deathbed act of bestowing a blessing on each son, foretelling their destinies and those of their tribes. Although each painting holds its own as an exceptional portrait, seeing the works together provides a unique experience for viewers, transporting them across history to make them a witness to that moment. At the Meadows, the paintings will be displayed together in one gallery.

It is not known who originally commissioned the series, but they were auctioned from the collection of a Jewish merchant named Benjamin Mendez in 1756. Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham, acquired the paintings for Auckland Castle, seeing in the public presentation of these works an opportunity to make a statement about the need for social, political and religious understanding and tolerance between Christians and Jews in Great Britain.

While in the USA, the paintings will also undergo in-depth technical study for the first time at the Kimbell Art Museum. This will include the use of infrared reflectography, ultra-violet light, x-radiography and pigment analysis. The goals of this work are twofold: first, to gain a better understanding of Zurbarán’s artistic process by exploring this unique series of related works; and second, to identify any additional needs for their ongoing conservation and care after they return to the U.K.

Accompanying the exhibition and conservation research will be an illustrated catalogue containing scholarly essays exploring the series from various historical, religious and artistic perspectives. Dr. Mark A. Roglán, Director, Meadows Museum, is the scientific director of the project and has helped to gather contributions by Claire Barry, Director of Conservation, Kimbell Art Museum; Professor John Barton, Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, Emeritus at Oxford University; Dr. Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at New York University; Dr. Christopher Ferguson, Curatorial, Conservation and Exhibitions Director, Auckland Castle; Dr. Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator, The Frick Collection; Akemi Herráez Vossbrink, PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge; Alexandra Letvin, PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University; and Dr. Edward Payne, Senior Curator, Spanish Art, Auckland Castle. This exhibition and study have been co- organized by the Meadows Museum, SMU; The Frick Collection; and Auckland Castle; in association with the Kimbell Art Museum. A generous gift from The Meadows Foundation has made this exhibition and study possible, with additional support from the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and the Center for Spain in America.

This focused exhibition of paintings is inspired by a work in the Meadows Museum’s collection, Picasso’s Still Life in a Landscape (1915). In the early 20th century, Picasso and the Mexican artist Diego Rivera both lived and worked in Paris. Initially friends, in 1915 they fell out because Diego Rivera accused Picasso of plagiarising the foliage from one of his own paintings.

The source of Rivera’s ire was the perceived semblance between his 1915 Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla) and Picasso’s Seated Man (1915-16), which in its first iteration – as seen by Rivera in another visit to Picasso’s studio in August 1915 – was known as Man Seated in Shrubbery. Rivera noted acute similarities between his canvas and that of the early state of Picasso’s work; namely, both works featured a similarly structured still life set outdoors. The Mexican artist’s very specific complaint was his former mentor’s liberal borrowing of Rivera’s formulaic foliage – scumbled patches of green and white paint on a dark ground.

Picasso/Rivera: Still Life and the Precedence of Form takes as its point of departure another case study of the two artists’ works: Picasso’s Still Life in a Landscape (1915) at the Meadows, which will be displayed for the first time with Rivera’s Still Life with Gray Bowl (Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin), painted in the same year. Exhibited in close proximity, these two paintings together encapsulate the two artists’ overlapping of themes and motif appropriation during that period.

Picasso/Rivera: Still Life and the Precedence of Form affords a closer look at the development of Picasso’s Still Life in a Landscape in the Meadows collection by presenting it together with its analogue from the Columbus Museum of Art as well as Rivera’s variation on the theme from Austin. The visual dialogue taking place in 1915 between these two giants of modern art will be further outlined through the display of Rivera’s 1915 Still Life with Bread Knife, a second generous loan from the Columbus Museum of Art. Beyond the rich anecdotes regarding the relationship of the two artists, this group of paintings provides an opportunity to find parallels as well as deviations between these canvases. In spite of limited wartime resources, 1914-15 proved to be a fecund era of creativity for both Picasso and Rivera.

Modern Spanish Art from the Asociación Colección Arte Contemporáneo is the first exhibition in America to present a comprehensive survey of Modern Art in Spain from the Belle Époque through the Kennedy years. The rich and diverse art created in Spain during this period is largely unknown in the U.S. due to the turmoil that took place in Spain at this time. Juxtaposing the modern art collection of the Meadows Museum with works from the Asociación Colección Arte Contemporáneo (ACAC) in the Museo Patio Herreriano of Valladolid, this exhibition brings together more than 90 paintings, sculptures and works on paper to demonstrate the most important aspects of Spanish modern art and shed light on the global connection between Spanish art and other international modern art movements.